AFP reports:
Sweden's parliament on Wednesday voted by a wide majority in favour of a gay marriage bill that allows homosexuals to wed in either a religious or civil ceremony.
The law will come into force on May 1.
"Parliament on Wednesday adopted the bill on a gender-neutral marriage law," parliament said in a statement.
Of 349 members of parliament, 261 voted in favour, 22 were opposed to the proposal, 16 abstained and 50 were absent.
In Sweden, heterosexuals can choose to marry in either a civil or religious ceremony, whereas homosexuals have until now only been allowed to register their "partnerships" in a civil ceremony.
Civil unions granting gays and lesbians the same legal status as married couples have been allowed under Swedish law since 1995.
Sweden, already a pioneer in giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children, would become one of the first countries in the world to allow gays to marry in a major Church.
The Lutheran Church, which was the state Church until 2000, has offered gays a religious blessing of their union since January 2007.
Read more here.
6 comments:
Belgium, Holland and Spain also give FULL marriage rights to their GLBT citizens. As do Canada, South Africa, and Norway.
They have not collapsed into civil war or a pit of fire, last I checked.
Civil unions in some form are available in Andorra, Australian, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, FInland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, the UK and Uruguay.
Go here for a map that shows the US map for states that have civil unions, states with marriage, states that ban marriage, and the Hate-States that ban both unions AND marriage.
FOR SHAME, AMerica.
IT
Sköl! :-D
Å JF, not Ö ;=)
It is skull, actually. The Vikings drank from the skulls of their enemies...
...and that, after I cut-n-pasted the "o mit umlaut" from your name, GÖran, below. ;-)
I can't win (congrats to Sweden, anyway!).
Hurra! (which, I believe, is how "hooray!" is spelled in Swedish ?)
So it is ;=)
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